The compliance of land-use planning with strategic spatial planning – insights from Zurich, Switzerland

ABSTRACT

Although many planning systems are based on a combination of traditional land-use planning and strategic spatial planning, the interplay between the two approaches remains insufficiently investigated. Focusing on the Canton of Zurich, we applied a qualitative content analysis to extract strategic planning intentions from the Cantonal Structure Plan (1995). We quantitatively analysed the compliance of changes in municipal land-use plans between 1996 and 2016 concerning the extracted planning intentions. The overall low rate of changes was accompanied by few active contradictions of land-use planning. Minor deviations from the strategic plan were seen in the spatial allocation of new building zones. Considering the socio-economic dynamics of the region, surprisingly few changes were detected regarding the permitted building density for residential and mixed-use areas. This leads us to the conclusion that the Cantonal Structure Plan (1995) was very successful in quantitatively limiting the expansion of building zones. However, it showed a limited active steering capacity regarding their allocation and the regulation of building density. Our analysis showed that margins of discretion play a key role in multi-level planning systems, balancing flexibility for locally adapted solutions against statutory boundaries to prevent their misuse, as such they need to be considered in planning evaluation.

KEYWORDS:

• Strategic planning
• zoning
• planning evaluation
• digital plan data
• federalism
• discretion

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Urs Wachter from the Cantonal Office for Spatial Development and Magnus Gocke from the Cantonal Statistical Office in Zurich for providing data and insights on the cantonal classification methods and helpful comments on our analysis. Moreover, we would like to warmly thank Sarah Radford from the WSL language-editing centre for her careful editorial support, Dr Gaëtan Palka, Dr Robert Pazur and Dr Ana Beatriz Pierri Daunt for great tips and tricks in python and R and the two anonymous reviewers, who helped us to substantially improve our article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation through the CONCUR project – From plans to land change: how strategic spatial planning contributes to the development of urban regions (ERC TBS Consolidator Grant number BSCGIO 157789).